Great White Games/Pinnacle Entertainment Group

robdavisrgg · Novice Joined: 15 Aug 2012 Posts: 34

I will be the first to admit that I love having a hard copy of a book but with SW that is not always an option. One of the things I love about my NOOK COLOR is the way it reads most PDF files as ebooks. I have PDFs of all my books and the ereader works fine with most of the newer ones like SWDE, Horror Comp., Dead Lands Reloaded. What I am finding however is that older ones like Fantasy Comp., Super Powers Comp., Ness. Evil and so on only seem to work well with the PDF reader on my NOOK? Has anyone else had this issue?
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Unstoppable Force Game Designs

Kertain · Novice Joined: 07 Aug 2011 Posts: 74

Can't really answer you questions, but do have some suggestions on PDF readers if you go down that route.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think the NOOK is Android based.
I recently got a new Android tablet and it took me awhile to find a PDF reader I liked and loaded quickly.

Try ezPDF Reader Pro, its not free but after trying 5-6 it was by far the best. Worse case if does not work properly you can return it within 12 hours (or something like that). They also have a Lite version..but haven't tried that.

Seeker of Truth · Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2012 2:03 pm Post subject:

I'm loving my Nexus 7 so far. I use Ebookdroid for reading pdfs, and its great so far. I haven't used it at the table yet, due to my current lack of a group, but I have no doubt it will be very useful. I've also got some other apps for drawing quick maps (a pint-like program), StoneTome for messing with Obsidian Portal, and Truly Random, a dice roller I can program with adventure generator tables.
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fanchergw · Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2012 2:58 pm Post subject:

I bought a Kindle Touch last spring, primarily for reading PDFs. If you ask the support people, they will sometimes admit that it has a 40 Mb limit to the PDF size that it can handle. What they seem not to even be aware of is that it is also unable to handle PDFs with layers, regardless of size. Unfortunately, this has really limited it's utility for me, as many SvgW PDFs (both by PEG and other licensees) have layers.

Gordon

The Dread Polack · Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2012 3:25 pm Post subject:

Im using a Motorola Xoom. I've found that the actual free Adobe Acrobat Reader loads large gaming pdfs the fastest of all the apps I've tried. EZ reader, Quickoffice (all forms of it) take for ever to load.

robdavisrgg · Novice Joined: 15 Aug 2012 Posts: 34

Thanks Kertain...
I went to the NOOK store and got the EZPDF reader and it works great! Just what I needed.
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Unstoppable Force Game Designs

kaltorak · Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2012 7:44 am Post subject:

I am using a Kindle DX, and I have no probs (apart some bordered image).

Jerome Sullivan · Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2012 9:03 am Post subject:

Using Motorola Xoom with ez PDF reader.

While I really like this reader when you use it to actually read the pdf, it's a major pain if you just want to flip through the pages because it only buffers the very next page, so when you flip through the next page while take while, about 3-10 seconds.

thudthwacker · Novice Joined: 28 Sep 2012 Posts: 28

The Dread Polack · Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2012 3:04 pm Post subject:

So far, the Adobe PDF reader is the only one that comes close to being able to flip through a book. It also depends on the complexity of the PDF. SW books, so far, have been easy on my tablet because they aren't really graphically intensive, and don't have as many pages as some. There's also the option of using the "Text Reflow" option which eliminates the graphics, but with the way so many rpg books are laid out, it sometimes jumples up the text boxes and tables, etc.

javierrivera · Novice Joined: 28 Sep 2011 Posts: 6

Dracones · Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2012 9:17 am Post subject:

I'm also on a Nexus 7 and I really like it for reading. Using ez pdf reader on it. I really like how the reader can zoom in on columns. Makes reading the PDF easier.

The only bad thing about current tablets and PDF is they can't flip through them quickly. They tend to cache a page or two ahead so page turning isn't slow, unless you try to flip through a lot of pages at once. Then it can bog down some.

The Dread Polack · Posted: Thu Oct 04, 2012 11:33 am Post subject:

Which I don't really understand. I know that tablets don't have the same power as a desktop or even a laptop, but you'd think it could handle a PDF, even a large one. Is it a software thing, or is there just something about how it all works that I don't understand?

javierrivera · Novice Joined: 28 Sep 2011 Posts: 6

Rendering complex pdfs are a compute expensive thing. Even netbooks have usually problem with them.

Role-playing books, which are usually heavy on high resolution art (high resolution is needed to allow good quality printing). Paizo was a bigger offender than Pinacle, their harbook pdfs rendered slow even on middle range machines, the problem was so real that Paizo now is publishing "Lite" version of their hardbook pdfs.

Dracones · Posted: Thu Oct 04, 2012 3:06 pm Post subject:

I think it has more to do with the PDF format being a complete bloated mess.

I can flip through full color magazines in Google's Play Magazine with beautiful high resolution images on my N7 but PDFs make my Linux desktop bog down.

People are using PDF because there isn't really any other format to use outside of epub/mobi which is for novels and not magazine or art heavy book layouts.

It'd be nice if say rpgdrivethru came up with an Anrdoid/iPad app and would push a nice open source magazine format through for that, but it'd probably be more $$ to create than they'd be interested in handling. At some point though something like that will get created and you'll see magazines and other similar publishers flock to it.

Redtwin · Posted: Thu Oct 04, 2012 11:27 pm Post subject:

The app I use is simply called PDF Viewer. It's options include the ability to disable images, which make it extremely fast. It's not pretty, but it's fast, and I don't need pretty for most of the reading I do.
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The Dread Polack · Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2012 10:27 am Post subject:

Is that the APV PDF Viewer? I can't seem to find an app simply called "PDF Viewer"